The egological vocabulary is a philosophical invention that has finally found its way into everyday language. While its use in everyday language is more or less unproblematic it turns out to be very difficult to clarify the semantics of concepts like "self-consciousness", "I" or "self". It is an important result of recent philosophy of mind that these concepts do not identify objects like other singular terms. The absence of an identifiable object of reference in self-relations does not imply the absence of any referential structure in self-consciousness. Self-consciousness hints at a unique form of reference that has no direct analogue in the realm of spatio-temporal objects. In order to secure a place for the egological vocabulary in contemporary philosophy of psychology, one has to look for a concept with empirical content and self-referential structures. These criteria can be fulfilled by the modern concept of the person that refers to someone who lives in the space of reasons under the conditions of possible self-consciousness. With good reasons, persons ascribe attitudes and actions to other persons that they would also ascribe to themselves. They acknowledge comparable values and follow similar life-plans. Persons mutually ascribe self-reference to each other in the sense of an epistemic and moral center of activity. In this respect, one can say that persons develop self-understanding.

Classification

Philosophy of Science, Theory of Science, Methodology, Ethics of the Social Sciences; Psychology